We've been hearing for years that integrated graphics—meaning your computer doesn't have its own, separate graphics card—won't catch up to the beefier cards, but it'll be good enough some day soon. Hasn't happened yet. But these reported benchmarks of Intel's new Ivy Bridge processors from CPU World look pretty promising.

The benchmarks compare a new i5-3570K with an HD 4000 (Ivy Bridge) with an i5-2500K/HD 3000 (Sandy Bridge). Ivy Bridge dominated. The new processor beat the current-generation Sandy Bridge i5 in 3DMark Vantage (an industry-standard tool to test such things) scores easily, and by far more than the 3 percent clockspeed advantage the new CPU has over last generation. It was 30.2 percent faster on StarCraft 2, 84.5 percent faster on Farcry 2, and on average came out to around 50 percent faster across all games.

It's still really early to make any kind of sweeping generalizations about Ivy Bridge. But we've been hearing all along that the biggest gains made this generation will be in integrated graphics performance and battery life. Let's hope these synthetic benchmarks are real, first of all, but also that they hold water in the real world. [EXP Review via CPU World via CNET]